REALTIME PLAYBACK TRICKS

How to get the most from realtime playback.
By Estelle MacDonald

So your animating and you have a multitude of layers with blurs, and glows, particles, behaviors and everything in-between? You might have noticed your realtime playback is suffering? My guess is yes! There are a number of tricks you can apply that will help your workflow and reduce the stress on your computer processing. Let’s go through them.

1. Reduce your preview area so that you are only playing back the portion of your animation that you need to see.

Set the in = command + option + I
Set the out = command + option + O

2. Set all the parameters of the filters, behaviors and particles while paused.

3. Turn off layers and filters that you don’t need to see immediately. Go to the layers tab F5 and de-check the box next to the layer, turn it back on when you need to see it.

4. Solo items you are working on. Select the object or layer you want to work on. Press control + s to solo that element, press control + s again to see everything. This is a really fantastic feature and is definitely a time saver.

Text layer soloed

Particle Emitter Tricks

Before adding a particle emitter, pause playback then add the particle, set its birth rate and change its parameters. If your particle source is animated, set all your parameters in the emitter then replace it with a still image. This still image "stand in" is also referred to as a proxy image.

1. From your file browser command +1 navigate to a still image of your animated particle source. (If you don’t have one you can easily export a still frame in either Motion or FCP.) Import it into your project below your animated particle source. Turn off the visibility for that layer by deselecting the left hand box.

2. Select the Emitter in the Layers tab.

3. Press F4 to bring the emitter tab forward in the Inspector and scroll down to the particle source.

4. Drag the still image from the icon in the layers tab over the particle source image icon and release it when you see a curved arrow.

5. Render out backgrounds, import them into your project, turn off the layers that were utilized to build the background, and keep building your composite. This is an extremely efficient workflow as separating elements and rendering as you build eeks out more system performance. You also still have those elements at your disposal for additional tweaking but they are no longer using precious resources